Culled from various sources, this collection includes over one million JPG, PNG and GIF album covers. The resolution ranges from "thumbnail" through to very large sizes. Filenames are variant in usefulness, although a good number indicate at least the name of the original album.

This dataset is for experimentation and image processing research only. At 148gb, the collection is large but not unmanageable (there is a torrent available) and allows a developer or artist to work with the material through various means. The differences in resolution, filename structure and arrangement encourage machine learning or visual recognition algorithms to be used.

Some possible experiments or outcomes that might be worth pursuing:

• Album recognition software that links to album collections, allowing a user to aim a phone at their album covers and see if they match any services or known digitized albums.
  
• Facial/Text Recognition that gives additional metadata about the images related to the content on them.
  
• Color/Palette analysis of the album covers to find themes or preferred colors - combined with the album recognition above, it is possible to find general "genre rules" for album covers.
  

Play around! Have fun! Please bear in mind, you must be respectful of the original creators of these materials.

Additional Notes

The album covers have been split semi-arbitrarily by letter, with the first unique filename letter being the determination. No additional sorting or categorization has been done.

Each file has been placed into a standard .TAR (Tape Archive) file, which can be unpacked using the TAR program, which is available for every computer platform. The GNU Foundation provides access to an an accessible, open source TAR utility. To unpack a given file, the command tar vxf filename.tar will work.

These million images are total over 148 gigabytes in size. If you are not used to working with collections of this size, consider downloading one of the smaller letters, such as album_covers_x.tar, which is only 292 megabytes in size (but still contains over 1,300 album images to work with).

There is no z. :)

CD Album cover covers.

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